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Myanmar's Suu Kyi meets junta minister: official
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Myanmar's Suu Kyi meets junta minister: official
AFP - Thursday, October 8
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YANGON (AFP) - – Detained pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi met with a minister from Myanmar's ruling junta Wednesday for the second time in a week, in the first signs of a resumed dialogue between the two sides.
The opposition icon met labour minister Aung Kyi, who is the official liaison between Suu Kyi and the government, for 30-minute talks at a state guest house in Yangon, a Myanmar official told AFP.
Details of the meeting were not disclosed, but on Saturday the pair met for the first time in 18 months, for talks likely to have centred on how to get sanctions against Myanmar lifted, according to her lawyer Nyan Win.
After years of advocating punitive measures against the junta, Suu Kyi appears to have eased her stance, recently writing to military regime leader Than Shwe offering suggestions for having Western sanctions lifted.
The state-controlled New Light of Myanmar newspaper reported Sunday that the Nobel Laureate and Aung Kyi discussed her letter, in which she also asked to meet with foreign diplomats in Yangon to speak about sanctions.
The media gave no further details of the content of their talks.
"According to what the government released about their first meeting it was because of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi's letter, so we assume today's meeting is also a follow-up to that," said Nyan Win. Daw is a term of respect in Myanmar.
"We welcome the meeting. They can exchange their opinions to solve problems," added the lawyer, who is also a spokesman for Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy (NLD) party.
He said he had asked for permission to meet Suu Kyi and hoped to do so Thursday, when he would ask her about what was discussed.
Saturday's 40-minute talks came a day after Suu Kyi's appeal against her extended house arrest was rejected.
Judges upheld her conviction over an incident in which an American man swam uninvited to her house in May, earning her an extra 18 months detention and provoking international outrage.
Washington in particular, which recently unveiled a major policy shift to re-engage the junta, has repeatedly pressed for the release of Suu Kyi, who has spent much of the past 20 years in detention.
The US held its highest-level talks with Myanmar in nearly 10 years last week, but warned against lifting sanctions until there is progress towards democracy.
Suu Kyi has welcomed the US moves towards engagement and believes there should be no pre-conditions for a dialogue between the two nations, her lawyers have said.
Her latest meeting with the junta minister "qualifies as rapid momentum" when compared with the political situation in Myanmar in recent years, according to David Mathieson, a Myanmar expert at Human Rights Watch.
But he said the meeting "should not be automatically applauded" and that higher-level talks with the senior leadership were now needed.
"It's got to be about how genuine a process it is. If it's just to fool the international community then it has no bearing at all," Mathieson said.
"The best way to look at it would be with guarded optimism from a background of deep scepticism," he added.
The extension of her house arrest keeps Suu Kyi out of the way for elections promised for next year by the junta, adding to critics' calls that the polls are a sham designed to legitimise the military regime's grip on power.
Suu Kyi's NLD won the last elections by a landslide in 1990, a result the ruling generals refused to acknowledge, leading the US and the European Union to impose sanctions.
In August, a court at Yangon's notorious Insein prison sentenced Suu Kyi to three years' hard labour, but the junta chief reduced that to 18 months' house arrest.
John Yettaw, an eccentric American who triggered the debacle by swimming to her crumbling lakeside home in May, was sentenced to seven years' hard labour, but was freed after a visit by US Senator Jim Webb.
Myanmar has been under military rule since 1962, with crackdowns on protests in 1988 and 2007.
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